This reminds me of something I noticed about economics and the Nobel Prize. Every other year or so, when the Nobel for economics is awarded, very often I notice

This reminds me of something I noticed about economics and the Nobel Prize. Every other year or so, when the Nobel for economics is awarded, very often I notice it's awarded for something that I already knew or considered obvious, or figured out independently. Yes, yes, I know the differentiator is that the person in question wrote academic papers about it, had influence within the field with formal citations, and often "proved" it (or explained it, formally, as much as one can in a soft science like economics), but it wasn't a fundamentally world-shaking or new breakthrough. Unlike say most of the physics prizes. When I first heard about the theory of relativity I wasn't like, "Duh, obvious!", or quantum mechanics, etc. But that has happened a lot with economics. Anyway this article made me think of it, because it started from the position that someone had discovered something totally new and unknown to mankind, only later to reveal that actually lots of people knew about it, they just didn't have an official academic name & categorization for it, formally, within the academic field in question. But it wasn't truly new. And strains the common meaning of what should be a powerful term: breakthrough.